Equality Invites Despotism

To a certain degree, equality invites despotism, because in order to make all members of society equal, and then to maintain this equality for along period of time, it is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality in every sector of the society and any aspect of human life: to paraphrase a well-known sentence by one of Dostoyevsky’s characters, “We start with absolute equality and we end up with absolute despotism.” Some call it a paradox of equality: the more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have; the more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality; the more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.133

Democracy Will Degenerate to Anarchy

Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

John Adams (1763)

Life, Liberty, and Property Come From God

Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property—this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Frederic Bastiat

The Mindlessness of the Liberal

The liberal-democratic man, just as his communist counterpart, lives in a world almost totally packed with conventions and interpretations, with very little space for individual initiative. He relies almost exclusively on ready-made formulas, moves within well-known stereotypes of thought and language through which he expresses his feelings of approval and disapproval and justifies his role in a community. The ideology that surrounds him is not only a set of concepts but also a system of mandatory practices: like an erstwhile African savage, he is expected to dance his ritual dances in order to manifest his tribal affiliation through the well-trained gestures and rhythms the village sorcerers taught him so that he could express his enthusiasm for the war his superiors thought it rational to wage against the enemies, or to give his joyful support of peace if this accords with the strategy of the tribe. For him there is no reality apart from that which bears the meaning given to it by the sorcerers. Nothing else exists, and if it does, it is not worth communicating.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.130-131.

Advertising With an Agenda

Today, it is not longer enough to simply advertise a product; the companies feel an irresistible need to attach to it a message that is ideologically correct. Even if this message does not have any commercial function—and it hardly ever does—any occasion is good to prove oneself to be a proponent of the brotherhood of races, a critic of the Church, and a supporter of homosexual marriage. This sycophantic wheedling is practiced by journalists, TV morons, pornographers, athletes, professors, artists, professional groups, and young people already infected with the ideological mass culture.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.121

Sexual Utopia Replaced by Sexual Anarchy

The sexual utopia did not come about, but sex was politicized and became a part of the official agenda of the state and its institutions. The rebels, without a moment’s hesitation, joined the ranks of the political structures and became their functionaries. The consequences of all this, however, were not necessarily quite those that were planned. Once institutionalized and absorbed into the system, sexual freedom permeated law, customs, social practices, schools, educational programs, and public discourse. Since then, the issues of human sexuality, abortion, homosexuality, and so-called reproductive rights have been espoused by the mainstream and begun to be the basic identification marks in liberal-democratic politics. Today, they are supported by the United Nations, the WHO, International tribunals, governments, the parliamentary majority, European institutions, universities, and innumerable think-tanks and non-governmental organizations. Long-haired hippies chanting “make love, not war” have been replaced by today’s politicians, teachers, bureaucrats, and lawyers.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.110-111.

The Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution is arguably the most extreme manifestation of the episodic nature of man. To surrender one’s life to sexual pleasure meant once and for all abandoning any attempt to give one’s existence a unifying meaning; this pleasure is, like no other, related to what is short-lived and ephemeral. Many wise men in the history of European thought consistently warned against the effects of the uncontrolled reign of pleasures over human life. In classical ethics pleasures were feared because they not only do not have a self-mitigating mechanism, but are likely, when unchecked, to do away with external mitigating measures. These warnings were not treated with the seriousness they deserved by modern utilitarians. With the growth of consumerism this fear evaporated. As the new rhetoric of sexual liberation declared the existing limitations on sex consumption unacceptable, the time finally came to push the cult of pleasure to a new low. Free sex was not only pleasure; it also stood for spontaneity against souls technology and productivity; it stood for peace and universal harmony, with no constraints, no domination, no discrimination.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.109-110.

Making Pleasure the Center of Life

Bringing pleasure to the center of life engendered a different image of human nature. Human beings, in this view, no longer think of themselves in terms of the whole of their existence, but in terms of moments and episodes. It could not be otherwise because there is no such thing as the pleasure of life. One can talk about pleasures and pleasant moments that happen in life, and one can even encourage people to collect those pleasures and pleasant moments, the more the better. But the latter strategy, even if successful, does not predetermine whether this or that particular life in its entirety is or is not happy. It may have many pleasant moments, but these do not automatically translate themselves into a unifying moral scenario, nor make a life fulfilled. To have a fulfilling life it is necessary to give it a durable inherent meaning that may very well coexist with having many pleasant moments, but is in no way a result of these moments, no matter how many. One can, of course, construe one's life as a series of episodes, but this must, to a greater or lesser degree, undermine the sense of continuity of existence, in more extreme cases leading to different identifications, each associated with a different episode. But even if our lives are episodic, our selves are not. Hence the life dedicated to the accumulation of pleasures, but lacking an internal unity, will most likely not be a happy life because a human being cannot renounce his unity without negative consequences.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.109.

Behind the Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution was the culmination of growing consumerism in Western societies, which in turn stemmed from the unprecedented prosperity an security that these societies had managed to achieve. Until the 1960s, the growing number of easily available goods did not include sex: this was regulated by existing social practices as well as by the old moral precepts going back to classical ethics. This growing consumerism tended to weaken both social practices and moral precepts, and replaced them with far less demanding and seemingly more natural criteria of a utilitarian kind, pleasure being the principal yardstick to measure the value of human goals. The impressive efficiency of modern civilization accustomed people to expect that their actions would be instantly gratified. Whatever delayed or hindered this gratification  was considered unnatural, repressive, incomprehensible, and in the long run unacceptable.

When we look at this mental change from the perspective of the history of philosophy, we can see in it the final—though, thank God, not yet closed—phase of a long process. From the beginning, pleasure was considered by philosophers to be and important part of the human experience, also having a complicated but powerful relation to morality. For twenty-five centuries the nature of this relationship had been the subject of an engaging and often illuminating debate. This debate unavoidably occasioned the use of other concepts, not identical to that of pleasure but somehow related to it: happiness, fulfillment, flourishing, and a few others. At the end of the day pleasure finally outclassed its rivals.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.108.

What Socialists Really Mean

Socialists cry, “Power to the people,” and raise the clenched fist as they say it.  We all know they really mean “Power over people. Power to the state!”

Margaret Thatcher

Epidemic of Ignorance In America

Basic content knowledge, including broad knowledge of civics, has been withheld from generations of students by our public schools. Instead, students have been fed — both in K-12 and in our universities — a steady diet of increasing resentment for American principles of freedom, tolerance, and constitutional self-governance. The radicalization of American education has been going on for decades.

This cannot be an accident. Those who claim that more government control over our lives will somehow “make us free” — the elites, the ruling classes — are committed to making the rest of us ignorant of what was actually at play in the American Revolution: an awareness that too much power in the hands of too few people is a bad thing. If such knowledge remained common, it would be bad news for the control freaks of the world. This is why they are committed to cultivating ignorance in youth, and then programming them to vote for the ruling class.

Policies of multiculturalism then brought us the insanity of identity politics, which basically erases a person’s individual identity and replaces it with various sorts of pigeon-holing. Students are only permitted to find self-worth through something called “intersectionality,” which scores them based on how many victim points they can claim.

Political correctness is designed to make sure they never question their miseducation, and instead conform to the elitist program from the fear of being socially isolated and academically punished if they show any tendencies towards independent thought. That’s a miserable way to live, so we shouldn’t be surprised that so many college students are going insane. …

The cultivators of ignorance have aimed not simply to destroy America’s national heritage, but also to destroy America’s very compass: the Judeo-Christian principles that form basis of the rule of law, and, therefore, freedom. Without that compass, Americans are set adrift, increasingly answering only to raw emotions of rage, envy, and grievance.

Too many Americans don’t really know what our rights and freedoms mean. They are groping around in the dark and have been programmed to swallow the lie that America was never great. As a result, we are too often dealing with a dumbed-down electorate unable to understand the basic framework of our republic.

They’re unable to understand what it means to govern ourselves, and they’re unable to understand the meaning of true freedom — that one must be free from government restraints in order to find his purpose and live freely. With the loss of this knowledge, and a culture that leads them astray from that birthright, they predictably become less able to think their own thoughts. Those who have completely lost their compass are more inclined to lose their minds in blind rage. And that is, sadly, where too many Americans are.

Stella Morabito, In An America This Ignorant, It’s No Wonder We Struggle To Stay Free

Sexual Promiscuity is Necessary for Socialism to Succeed

The concept [that human sexual impulses had been deleteriously suppressed and if sex was liberated life would be immeasurably nicer] received its revolutionary form from Herbert Marcuse, who back in the 1950s came up with a theory—a mixture of Freudianism and Marxism—explaining how to combine sexual liberation with a political struggle to overthrow the system. His argument was roughly composed of two elements: the first a rather diabolical image of the modern capitalist world, able to repel and neutralize all the revolutionary movements of change; the second, an interpretation of sex as the only power in man and society, inherently subversive and as yet uncontrolled by the powers that be. Hence, the proclamation of sexual liberation was a call to political collective action, and sex itself became the paramount political weapon. For some time, this diagnosis remained unnoticed and was considered by many to be quite silly.  Why would sexual promiscuity be a tool of political struggle? The very idea seemed unworthy of intellectual attention. However, after several years this theory gained great popularity, especially—as is fairly easy to understand—among young people, including the rebellious students on university campuses.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.107-108.

The Politicization of Sex is Necessary for Socialism to Succeed

The stifling intrusiveness of liberal democracy should not come to us as a surprise once we remember its inner dialectic. Liberalism, ass we recall, created a private man and wanted to deliver the vast majority of human race from the burden—unnatural and unnecessary, as liberals thought—of politics. It succeeded in the first task, and failed in the second. Liberalism, indeed, made people private on an unprecedented scale. Yet these people, having discovered the importance of their privacy, did not renounce politics. Hence when a liberal-democratic man became involve in political activities, it was natural that he imbued them with what he regarded to be the closest to him, what he lived for and breathed and what provided him with the reason for being. But these were matters so far regarded as private. The liberal-democratic man politicized his privacy, perhaps his main contribution to the change in thinking about politics. He politicized marriage, family relations, communal life, language. In this he resembled his communists comrade. But his greatest success in this regard, unmatched so far by any competitor, was to politicize the area that seemed to be the most private of all things private, the most intimate of all things intimate and thus the least appropriate to political meddling: the realm of sex.

Obviously the intentions to politicize sex had appeared before in radical programs aimed at fundamental transformation of society, including the destruction of its traditional institutions. Those radicals and revolutionaries who were looking for a better foundation for a better society knew very well that their program must fail unless they managed to do something with the family. This institution was always considered, quite understandably, to be the most serious obstacle to the task of building a new society.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.105-106.

No Such People as “Palestinians”

In order to destroy the impression of the tiny Jewish state’s facing enormous Muslim Arab foes and prevailing, the Soviet KGB (the Soviet Committee for State Security) developed the fiction of an even smaller people, the “Palestinians,” menaced by a well-oiled and ruthless Israeli war machine. In A.D. 134, the Romans had expelled the Jews from Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt and renamed the region Palestine, a name they plucked from the Bible, the name of the Israelites ancient enemies, the Philistines. But never had the name Palestinian referred to anything but a region, not to a people or an ethnicity. In the 1960s, however, the KGB and … Yasir Arafat created both these allegedly oppressed people and the instrument of their freedom, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

Robert Spencer, The History of Jihad from Muhammad to ISIS, pg. 309

Tolerance the Last Virtue?

Tolerance is the last virtue of a depraved society. When you have an immoral society that has blatantly, proudly, violated all of the commandments of God, there is one last virtue they insist upon: tolerance for their immorality.

D. James Kennedy

The War of Political Correctness

… In a liberal democracy seemingly everything is permissible, but politically incorrect events immediately trigger an avalanche reaction of resistance: intellectuals protest, journalists on television twist their faces in moral indignation, comedians use the whip of satire, and the lumpen-intelligentsia, delighted with all that indignation, whistle, heckle, stomp their feet, and demand exemplary punishment of the perpetrators. …

The warriors of political correctness thing of themselves in the category of the struggle between David and Goliath. Nothing can be further from the truth. They belong to the mainstream, having all the instruments of power at their disposal. On their side are the courts, both national and international, the UN and its agencies, the European Union with all its institutions, countless media, universities, and public opinion. The illusion they cherish of being a brave minority heroically facing the whole world, false as it is, gives them nevertheless a strange sense of comfort: they feel absolutely safe, being equipped with the most powerful political tools in today’s world but at the same time priding themselves on their courage and decency, which are more formidable the more awesome the image of the enemy becomes.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.104-105

With Liberals, What Is Incidental Must be Treated as Systematic

In both communism and liberal democracy we encounter the same peculiarity: what is incidental is treated as a systematic problem, which really means that whatever happens is systemic and nothing is incidental to the system. It thus becomes natural for true liberal democrats—as it was for true communists—to harass their colleagues because of a causal remark, or a lack of vigilance, or an improper joke, making the lives of unruly individuals difficult by constantly admonishing and creating further regulations and stricter laws. By doing so, the self-proclaimed guardians of purity see themselves as carrying on their shoulders the responsibility for the future of liberal democracy worldwide. If not for their effort and dedication, this great political enterprise, they think, would become fouled, and then—perish the thought. 

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.103

Political Correctness

There is nothing mysterious about [the rise of political correctness].  It is simply a practical consequence of the view that the duty of citizens of the liberal-democratic society is to participate in the great collective enterprise, where everyone cooperates with everyone else at all levels and under all circumstances. I we look at three…examples—family life, a book’s content, and popular jokes—we can see that from the politically correct perspective they are no longer irrelevant trivialities. They illustrate what is absolutely crucial for the entire logic of liberal democracy. Because the logic of this system turns on “dialogue,” “respect,” “equal rights,” “openness,” and “tolerance,” everything is by definition political, and nothing that relates, however remotely, to these notations is trivial, minor, or irrelevant. A slight offensive remark must always be regarded as a manifestation of mortal sin. What seems a barely visible mark on the surface conceals underneath swirling currents of hatred, intolerance, racism, and hegemony. The body responsible for ensuring that these terrible things do not surface is the state, with all the instruments at its disposal. It is the state that should incessantly work to impose and improve cooperation policies by removing all real and potential barriers, creating a favorable legal environment, and reshaping public space and education in such a way that the people’s minds internalize the rules of politically correct thinking.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.100

Multiculturalism Hoax

The word “multiculturalism,” still used today despite numerous criticisms and ridicule, represents yet another hoax that liberal democracy created and that turned out to be surprisingly effective. Both parts of the word misrepresent reality. Multiculturalism is not about culture but about politics. In fact, they should be “polit” (as in “politburo”) rather than “cultur,” and “mono” rather than “multi.”

Many ingredients of the multicultural cake are not ingredients any more but have become the cake itself. Feminism is not the “culture” of feminists or feminist parties or women, but the political platform espoused by governments, the European Union, and many international institutions; the ideology of homosexuality is no longer in the hands of homosexual activists and their organizations but is a major item in national and global agendas. A nation that would dare to entertain any misgivings in this regard or, for example, include wording in its Constitution—as was recently done by the Hungarians—that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, would be subjected to almost worldwide condemnation expressed in the rhetoric of rage and hatred.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.95-96

The Liberal Fraud of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, an idea that has become extremely popular in recent decades, is nothing more that a program to build a society in which there exist not many cultures, but many political identities attached to many real or, more often, imagined collectives. Multiculturalism encourages what is today called identity politics. This term may be misleading. It has little to do with a defense of the rich fabric of societies and their historically constituted communities, but should be rather seen as a program of politicization of certain groups that could radically change the fabric of society. …

Women, homosexuals, Muslims, ethnic groups are being perceived as, and transformed into, quasi-parties, organized from above by the political or ideological leadership and not possessing other characteristics than those resulting from the struggle for power against other groups and no other identity than that provided by this leadership, allowing no ideological dissent. Whoever is not a member of this quasi-party, even though for some reason—be it sex, birth, or color—he should be included, but stays outside its boundaries or sometimes even opposes it, is the enemy, a sellout, and a traitor. A black American who condemns the absurdity of African-Americanism, regardless of his virtues and achievements, is considered as much a traitor to his race. A woman who rejects feminism for its crude and destructive ideological content is a traitor to the sisterhood.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.95

Liberalism Cannot Live with Traditional Schooling

Just as communism was not possible with families adhering to the feudal-patriarchal system, so liberal democracy is believed to be incomplete and unsuccessful with schools respecting traditional moral and cultural authoritarianism. The arguments are analogous. Just as a person coming from a noncommunist community could not become a full-fledged, dedicated, and efficient citizen of the communist state, so a graduate of a traditional school will never be a faithful and reliable citizen of the liberal-democratic state.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.93

Liberalism—A Doctrine of Power

Liberalism is primarily a doctrine of power, both self-regarding and other-regarding: it aims to limit the power of other agents, and at the same time grants enormous prerogatives for itself. In a sense it is a super-theory of society, logically prior to and—by its own declaration of self-importance—higher than any other. It attributes to itself the right to be more general, more spacious, and more universal than any of its rivals. Its goal is—as the liberals say—to create a general framework within which others will be able to cooperate. The liberals will never voluntarily give up this admittedly highest of political prerogatives to anyone and will never agree to share it. …

In its essence, liberalism is unabashedly aggressive because it is determined to hunt down all nonliberal agents and ideas, which it treats as a threat to itself and to humanity. The organizing principle of liberalism—as in all other philosophies aiming to change the world radically—is therefore dualism, not pluralism.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.77, 78

Communism and Liberal Democracy are Equal

Communism and liberal democracy are related by a similarly paradoxical approach to politics: both promised to reduce the role of politics in human life, yet induced politicization on a scale unknown in previous history.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.73

The Liberal Invasion of Universities

The universities are undergoing the same process [of liberal takeover], which is most unfortunate because they were regarded for centuries as free industries of the human mind. Today, any such belief is clearly in discord with reality. The entire educational process has been systematically standardized to make it as close as possible to the liberal-democratic model, in which group rights are carefully watched, detailed verification and appeal procedures have been established, and the principle of equality in increasingly more influential in academic community relations. The humanities and social sciences have long since declared a keen interest in participating in the process of liberal-democratic changes and are vigorously supported in their actions by ministries of education, political associations, and supranational institutions. The liberal-democratic jargon, which so painfully dominates political life also invaded academic life, which slowly became a reflection of the entire public sphere. Universities are increasingly eager to introduce a liberal-democratic regime, which makes the vast majority of academics convinced that they operate in an institution that enjoys the greatest freedom in its history. But in fact, freedom is in retreat.

The emergence of liberal democracy at educational institutions led—as elsewhere—to considerable restrictions of the very liberty that universities enjoyed previously. These developments are undermining a long and admirable academic tradition. Of course, in the post communist countries, not much was left to be undermined because the old regime managed to deal with the academic tradition very effectively—with no small participation of the academics themselves. Remnants of tradition were occasionally still invoked as a weapon against the excessive intrusion of the communist government. Whatever else remained of the old days was wiped clean by the new order. In an age of an increasing number of rights, continuous group demands, equality, and officially hunted deviations from the established political line, academic tradition did not stand a chance. The Universities began to resemble businesses on the one hand and liberal-democratic political structures on the other.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.68-6